Joe Biden made history on World AIDS Day last Sunday by being the first president to display panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the White House’s South Lawn. Biden and others mentioned the quilt in their speeches to commemorate the occasion.

The following day, the Library of Congress announced its release of over 125,000 items — including letters, diaries, photographs, and other materials — documenting the lives of those represented in the Quilt. The documents will complement the library’s digitized version of the quilt online, providing the world with a deeper insight into one of the most poignant symbols of the U.S. AIDS epidemic.

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A total of 124 panels from the quilt were laid out, each one decorated with names and icons representing someone who lost their life to HIV-related illnesses. A massive red ribbon also graced the White House’s southern portico — the iconic decoration has been an annual White House tradition since 2007. 

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In his speech, Biden mentioned that the idea of the quilt was conceived in 1985 by Cleve Jones and Mike Smith to honor the memory of all those lost to HIV and AIDS.

“It started with one name on one panel nearly four decades ago. And decades later, 50,000 panels and 110,000 names,” Biden said. “This quilt weighs 54 tons, the largest community art project in the entire world, and tells the tragic stories of brothers who died too soon; moms who contracted AIDS at childbirth — her daughter’s life stolen, eventually her own as well; friends and partners who lost loved ones of their lives; and so many more stories of precious lives cut too short.”

“The first threads of this quilt… stitched nearly 40 years ago, this movement is fully woven into the fabric and history of America, shining a light on the memory and the legacy of … [those] who we’ve lost to this terrible disease,” Biden added. “[The quilt’s panels] bring back all the memories. They’re hard.  It’s not easy, [but[ it’s important.”

On Monday, the Library of Congress announced the release of its newly digitized collection of AIDS Memorial Quilt records. The records include files listing the names of people with panels on the quilt.

“A typical panel file contains a letter written by a panel’s maker,” the collection’s website says. “These moving and heartfelt letters often include memories and descriptions of the AIDS victim memorialized on the panel, or explain the maker’s motivations. The files also often contain obituaries, news clippings, and funeral service prayer cards.”

The files also include photographs and portraits of those who passed away, providing a face and emotional insights into the lives of those commemorated and the people they left behind. The ordered files are labeled, making it easy for viewers to connect names, faces, and stories of those lost to the epidemic.

“The digitized AIDS Memorial Quilt Records collection is a major milestone not only in our preservation efforts but also in ensuring that the stories, lives, and collective memory of those lost to the AIDS epidemic remain accessible to future generations around the world,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. 

The digital collection presents the manuscript and still image panel maker records for Quilt panels that are more than 25 years old. Records concerning panels that are less than 25 years old and other media formats are available onsite in the Folklife Reading Room.

In her address at the White House World AIDS Day event, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden said, “The act of quilting creates a work of art that wraps us up in its beauty. This one was woven together with a grief powerful enough to move the world toward unity, acceptance, compassion, and grace.”

“As I look at this beautiful quilt, with its bright colors,” she added, “the names in big block letters, renderings of lives and loves, I see it as a mom.  And I think of the mothers who stitched their pain into a patchworked panel so the world would remember their child not as the victim of a vicious disease but as a son who had played in the high school jazz band, as the child who grew up to proudly serve our nation in uniform, as the daughter whose favorite holiday was Christmas.”

The event also featured a speech by Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted HIV at the age of 13 from a blood transfusion. He gained national attention when he tried to return to school, but faced discrimination from his Indiana community.

He eventually won his right to attend school and became the national face of public HIV education until his death at age 18. His 1990 death from AIDS inspired an eponymous federal program providing financial assistance for HIV medications.

“[Ryan] taught America we needed to fight AIDS and not the people who have it,” White-Ginder said. “In 1990 … shortly after Ryan died, Senator [Ted] Kennedy (D) asked me if I would come to Washington to explain to senators how vital it was to pass the AIDS bill which had been recently named after my son … the Ryan White CARE Act. He said I was something much more powerful than a lobbyist: I was a mother. I am sure that Dr. Biden can relate.” 

“In the 34 years since, that’s exactly what I’ve tried to do, in partnership with the extraordinary community here today that has become my family,” she added.

A quick history of the AIDS Quilt

The AIDS Quilt has 50,000 panels and weighs 54 tons. It remains under the permanent care of the National AIDS Memorial Grove (NAMG), a non-profit that maintains a 10-acre place of remembrance in Golden Gate Park.

In a December 2017 interview with Fresh Air, longtime LGBTQ+ activist Cleve Jones said he came up with the idea for the quilt on November 27, 1985, during an annual candlelight tribute for assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk and then-Mayor of San Francisco George Moscone.

Struck by the epidemic’s 1,000-person death toll, he had attendees write the names of their deceased loved ones on poster boards that they they posted onto the front of building that housed the Health and Human Services West Coast offices for the federal government, then under the Reagan administration, which refused to publicly acknowledge the epidemic until four years after it started.

“I thought to myself, it looks like some kind of quilt,” Jones said. “And it was such a warm and comforting and Middle American traditional family values sort of symbol. And I thought ‘This is the symbol we should take.’ And everybody told me it was the stupidest thing they’d ever heard of.”

While these first panels were made as a way to help ensure that history wouldn’t forget those who had passed, today the quilt is “the largest ongoing community folk art project in the world.” Its panels have been sewn by families, friends, and lovers to immortalize more than 105,000 individuals whose lives were lost to HIV.

Each panel is three feet by six feet, the approximate size of a grave, Jones says. “The last display of the entire quilt was in 1996 when we covered the National Mall from the steps of the Capitol building all the way to the Washington Monument,” he added.

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